VRINCTI BULOW
play-acting. Asquith speaks in his memoirs of the flippant
credulity which was and is one of his most besetting
sins. Mis exaggerated respect for wealth lie shared with
" Uncle Kdward," Both set far greater store by capital and
capitalists than by virtue and die virtuous. Kdward VII was by
nature less given to prejudice than his Imperial nephew. But
with the latter, too, money could tear down the highest
barriers. Not only Krupp, armourer and goldsmith at once,
but: of her moncy-rnokers farther removed from the springs
of war had appealed to his love of display. Perhaps it meant
more to the Kaiser than to his Royal uncle that the gifted
capitalist should be something of a general raising armies
from the ground, if only armies of workers.
William II wanted to be Gcsar Augustus, and at the same
time the restless Hadrian and the eternally moralising Marcus
Aurelius; unhappily, also, there was in him something of Nero
publicly playing on the lute and setting fire to Rome, though it
was not by deeds so much as by loose speech that William II
was fated to contribute involuntarily towards setting ablaze
the allied madhouses of Central Europe bristling with arms,
and those of the west equally armed to the teeth. But he also
wanted to be Diocletian, not, of course, a persecutor of
Christians—being one who came and went between Sinai and
his barracks—but a slayer of Socialists. Rome had not been
built in a day, but Emperor William, egged on by an ambitious
and clevet Admiral, wanted to create the German fleet in a
decade, forgetting that the Prussian army was the work of a
whole line of Brandenburg princes. And the instrument
for this feat of unexampled ambition, which British ambition
steadfastly opposed, was to be Billow. These two then were
to contribute towards the greatest tragedy in the conflagration
that was preparing, the moment when the German fleet, the
fruit of tremendous technical power, unique industrial effort
and long contention between Reichstag and Government,
was to be scuttled. No tragedy of the Great War equalled
this.
What magnificent castles in the air, whatjfo/rf morgana rose
up in the soul of the Kaiser during the long years of his rule !
How much pseudo-realistic policy mingled with romanticism
and mysticism bubbled in the excited brain of the German
Imperator. What an ardent ambition, too, he cherished to